


Pash

by 221b_hound



Series: Captains of Industry [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence - A Study in Pink, Hand Feeding, Kissing, M/M, Picnics, Sherlock's Past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 19:00:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5016493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two hours and fifteen minutes ago, two men declared their love on a rooftop in Melbourne. Now they are enjoying a picnic, but not nearly as much as they enjoy <em>pashing</em>, as the Australians say. But kisses are interupted with a story of past failure, and then a new way to look at it, and then there's ice cream!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pash

**Author's Note:**

> Pash.  
> Verb (Australian slang)  
> to kiss passionately; to snog

Sherlock doesn’t mean to keep count, but he does. He can’t help it. His internal timer, which is always keeping track of so many things, is singing it inside his head. The timer is a violin playing a major chord progression in G – peppered with uplifting notes and sharps for anticipation – that just keeps getting more complex and happier and happier.

Two hours and fifteen minutes ago, says the singing timer in his head, he and John Watson, who is perfect in every way, danced above Melbourne trading _I love you_ – too early and overdue, both, and so perfectly timed.

Two hours and sixteen minutes, it sings, as Sherlock breaks a piece of smoked aged vintage cheddar from the small block and feeds it to John.

They are having a late lunch in the Fitzroy Gardens under the shade of the plane tree walk – thankfully free of weddings today – that juts off from the main elm-lined paths (superficially laid out like a Union Jack). Sherlock is sitting up and John is stretched out on the grass, head in Sherlock’s lap.

They stopped for picnic supplies at Spring Street Grocer an hour ago, before walking here. They went down the spiral stairs to the cheese basement for supplies, and then upstairs again for organic apples, buttery oatmeal biscuits, a tub of the day’s salad (spiced lentils and roasted Jerusalem artichoke with broccoli, radish and sweet corn zhuzhed up with a lemon dill dressing) and a few bottles of Strangelove (smoked cola for Sherlock, blood orange and chilli for John).

‘These trees all have email addresses you know,’ remarks John, and then lips the cheese from Sherlock’s fingers. He eats his morsel of cheese slowly and with great enjoyment. Sherlock kisses a crumb from John’s lips. When he’s able to, John continues. ‘It’s supposed to be so people can report on trees that need council attention, but Melburnians are a bit weird. They keep emailing love letters to the trees.’

Sherlock would once have thought that notion ludicrous beyond belief and derided it with cutting force. Now he just makes a mental note to look up this particular London plane tree on the council database, so he can send it thanks for shading him and John on this auspicious day. He bites an apple, then offers the apple to John to take his own bite. Then they kiss again, to swap crisp, tart sweetness on their tongues. It’s a little awkward, curling his body over so they can do so, but they wriggle a bit, and John leans up while Sherlock leans down, and they kiss for a while longer.

A jogger, four cyclists and someone walking three King Charles Spaniels go past them on the path and all of them see the two men kissing, and all of them smile. It’s a lovely warm day. A good day for lovers.

~~

John has a very refined internal clock. He honed it on a battlefield where lives depended on it, and he uses it now to mentally time perfect shots of coffee. So though he isn’t really trying to keep count, he can’t help but know – two hours and nineteen minutes ago, Sherlock Holmes said _I love you_ , and John said it back, and it was both sudden and inevitable, and John feels like the world got bigger and brighter and more intense, with him and Sherlock at the centre of it.

They’re kissing again – they can’t seem to stop, and really, why would they want to? Pashing, it’s called in Aussie vernacular. Passionate kissing. Associated often with teenagers and their uninhibited, sloppy tongue-kissing. John’s a better kisser now than he was those twenty-odd years ago, but he feels like a teenager again – like he’s got springtime in his veins and the world is full of potential and he could be anything he wanted. Anything. Anything at all.

Sherlock curls away from him again, though his pale eyes, sparking warm, keep a kind of connection between them as he sits up and selects some more cheese. It’s a Holy Goat Black Silk – creamy and tangy, coated in fine ash. John licks it from Sherlock’s fingers, sucks on those fingers a little and then kisses the pads of them, which Sherlock presses to his own lips. John tears his eyes from Sherlock’s mouth long enough to gather up a pinch of the cheese himself and lift it so that Sherlock can, in turn, suck dairy goodness from John’s forefinger and thumb.

Seriously. It’s getting obscene, the way they eat cheese.

A pair of parrots zoom past them then, bright green backs and pale blue breasts blurring into a smear of intense colour. They’re too fast to see the other markings, but John knows what they are. Purple crowned lorikeets. They’ll have little purple caps and cheeks daubed in orange. He loves that there are parks and parrots in the middle of Melbourne. Everything is smaller in scale compared to London, which is also full of parks but not parrots, so much – so it reminds him of London while not being precisely like home, so it’s the best of both worlds.

Sherlock picks up John’s half-finished Strangelove soft drink and takes a sip. His brow furrows. Then clears. Then furrows. He sucks at the taste of chilli, blood orange and soda on his tongue and bends to kiss the taste over to John, and they do that for a bit.

John grins as Sherlock draws away again. ‘Not for you, eh?’

‘What is this obsession with putting chilli in everything?’

John glances towards Sherlock’s now-empty bottle of smoked cola. ‘What’s the obsession with _smoking_ everything?’

‘You liked it.’ Sherlock had kissed that flavour over earlier on.

John just grins some more.

‘Murder fruit should be left to stand on its own,’ says Sherlock, like he’s a puritan about it.

‘Murder fruit?’ John’s eyebrow arches up, but he’s still grinning. Sherlock’s mouth sort of dimples in an impish return smile (and John thinks, _he’s stopped being afraid of what he says. Oh **good**_ ).

‘You’ve _seen_ a blood orange in its natural state.’

Well, of course John has. The deep red that stains the pulp of the fruit, dark as blood. ‘You’re right. Murder fruit is a good name for them.’

‘Six year old me certainly thought so.’

John’s face sort of _beams_ with the picture thus conjured of Sherlock Holmes, six years old, naming alarming-looking citruses.

~~

Two hours and twenty five minutes, thinks Sherlock, and John hasn’t asked. Will he ask? Should he tell?

~~

Two hours and twenty five minutes, thinks John, and he wants me to know about that other thing. We got distracted before and didn’t go into detail, then we had better things to say. And dancing to do. But he’s looking at me now like he wants me to know more. _Murder fruit_ reminded him.

‘These murders the Met thought you’d done. Do you want to tell me about it?’

~~

Sherlock doesn’t want this glory to end at two hours and thirty five minutes, but he’s the one who brought it up, and anyway, John doesn’t look squeamish, or afraid, or anything but a little curious and very open to whatever comes next. His body is still relaxed and his blue eyes are wide and frank and frankly wonderful.

‘Are you sure you want to know?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ says John, surprisingly gently, and with surprising affection, ‘I like hearing about you being brilliant.’

So Sherlock tells John about the murders that looked like serial suicides, and how he snuck to the crime scenes afterwards, and retraced each dead person’s last steps, and worked out how it was being done, and a profile of who, and even a theory as to why.

He tells John about how he went to the Met and informed them that a serial killing cabbie was on the loose; how he operated and even the likely depot he worked from. Give him two more days, Sherlock had said, and he would have the individual cabbie responsible. An older man, he told them, probably acrimoniously divorced, estranged from his children. Given Sherlock could find no older, similar murders the chances were that something dramatic had recently changed in his life to trigger the murder spree. A terminal diagnosis, most likely. Something that made him not care what he did or if he was caught. Nothing left to lose and a lot of rage to express.

And how the Met had held him for three days to ‘help with their enquiries’ without doing a damned thing about the information he provided. He tried to tell them again, and again, and again, and that idiot DI Bradstreet never listened. They had to let him go, of course: the Met had only the most circumstantial of evidence to hold him, and Mr Holmes Senior had very expensive, very good lawyers.

Sherlock told how his father had sent him to Australia – against legal advice – to “fetch that idiot brother home” and how two more murders had taken place, days apart, at a time when Sherlock could not possibly have committed them, seeing as how he was unquestionably on the other side of the planet.

And how Bradstreet, at long fucking last, had reviewed Sherlock’s statement, realised the truth and within two days had found the dying-of-cancer, fuck-the-world, fucking-die-the-lot-of-you cabbie, and his two bottles of pills for his victims to choose from, and his gun that was actually a cigarette lighter that he used to make them choose (just as Sherlock had deduced). Bradstreet had, of course, taken all the credit.

He and John are both serious, now. John sat up part way through the story and faced Sherlock while he told it. He has one hand pressed to Sherlock’s knee, and the other is holding Sherlock’s hand.

‘It turns out it’s rather a sad story,’ says Sherlock, looking at their joined hands. He has spoiled the day, he thinks. He has taken this bright happy thing and tarnished it.

John raises Sherlock’s hand and kisses his fingers, his knuckles, the back of his hand, his wrist.

‘You were brilliant,’ says John in a compelling tone, ‘If those idiots had just listened to you…’

‘But they didn’t. I failed to make them understand. They wouldn’t listen and two more people died.’

‘Sherlock.’

Sherlock finally looks up to see John’s gaze fierce and also tender upon him.

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘I should have made them listen.’

‘Sometimes you can’t,’ said John, ‘Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much you know or how right you are, some people are just dumb motherfuckers and won’t listen. They won’t learn. They won’t even try to understand something they’ve never encountered before. And someone as rare as you? As amazing? They go actively blind and deaf. Their failure is not your fault.’

‘You asked if I killed anyone. I haven't. But two more people died because I failed. A teenaged girl on her way to a West End musical, and an old man who didn’t want to walk in the rain. They died because I couldn’t make them listen.’

John is kneeling in front of him now, his knees between Sherlock’s stretched out legs, and he takes Shelrock’s face in his hands.

‘Listen to me.’

He says it with such gravitas that Sherlock _listens_. This will be important. He knows it will. John’s whole demeanour says so.

‘You can’t blame yourself for choices other people make. Don’t take on responsibility that isn’t yours. It’ll drive you mad, thinking about the ones you couldn't save. I _know_.’

And he does, Sherlock realises. Ex-soldier, ex-medic John knows about the weight of this.

‘Sherlock, you have remember the ones _after_.’

‘There weren't any _after_.’ He’s confused. John’s meant to be _smart_.

‘Yes there _were_. All the ones he _didn’t_ kill. All the ones who never had a moment’s danger, and will live out their lives without the slightest shadow of fear, for their families or for themselves, because of you. They’ll never have nightmares about who they lost, or being stalked by a cruel, vicious lunatic. Those unknown strangers you saved won’t know to be grateful for what you did.’

Shelrock’s eyes are wide, and his mind is wide, and his soul is wide, drinking all this in.

‘But _I_ do,’ says John, soft and steady, a truth to cap all the other truths he’s just said. ‘ _I_ know what you achieved.’

Sherlock has never thought of it that way before. Why has he never thought of it that way before? Too focused on the failure. Not on the success of the Met listening at last, of Bradstreet acting on his statement at last. Two more died, but how many more _did not_ , because of what he knew and told?

John hasn’t finished yet. ‘You solved it. You _stopped_ it. Even if that fucker Bradstreet got the credit, _you_ gave him the intel that caught the cabbie. That was you. Just like it was you the other night, when you stopped that dipshit from drugging his ex. God knows what he would have done. But you saw it. You warned her. You stopped it. _You. Are. Amazing_.’

Sherlock can’t help himself. He scoops John up, a hand on his jaw, another across his back, and he pulls John in and kisses John. Passionately.

And John, for his part, falls gracefully and eagerly into the embrace and kisses him back. He doesn’t even notice (or later care) that his knee has ended up in the remains of the Holy Goat ash cheese.

~~

At three hours and twelve minutes after _I Love You_ , they are back at Spring Street Grocer eating house-made gelato. There is a spoon battle going on, with John nicking a taste of Sherlock’s cardamom and pistachio while Sherlock makes incursions against John’s almond milk with blueberry. The skirmishes are conducted amidst much giggling and sweet collateral damage to collars, fingers, hair and faces. John leans over to kiss ice cream off Sherlock’s cheek, and Sherlock moves at the last minute so that they pash again. The rest of their ice cream melts to a puddle in the interim.

~~

Five hours and twenty two minutes have passed since they danced on the rooftop and Mike Stamford posted #hipstersinlove to Instagram. The photo already has 314 Likes. Lying on John’s bed, fresh and still a little damp from their shower, they each add a Like of their own.

Sherlock’s hair has won its defiant battle against product and, freshly washed, is now a tumble of curls through which John runs his fingers as they kiss.

Sherlock is naked but for John’s robe, and John’s hands roam all over his skin. John is in an unbuttoned check shirt and nothing else, and Sherlock’s hands roam all over his body, too.

They’re both sporting plump semi-erections but neither is in a rush. They can take all night if they want to. Right now – five hours and twenty four minutes after declarations swift and profoundly true – they cuddle together, touching a lot, kissing a lot more: languid, lazy, the world shrunk down to their two warm bodies, their two softly loving mouths – pashing.

**Author's Note:**

> Melbourne trees really do have [email addresses for trees](http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/people-around-the-world-have-been-emailing-trees-in-melbourne-to-confess-their-love/story-fnjww010-1227445747796) to which people write letters.
> 
> [This is the Black Silk Holy Goat cheese. ](http://holygoatcheese.com/cheese/cheeses/)
> 
> Here are some purple-crowned lorikeets:  
> 
> 
> Strangelove soft drink:  
> 
> 
> And Grocer gelato. I honestly hardly bother with any other ice cream any more. I wait for Grocer, because I'm worth it.  
> 
> 
> And as a bonus here's [Dorsal Fins covering the Kate Ceberano classic, 'Pash'.](https://youtu.be/SMbpbJ7k3_k)


End file.
